


I Want to Be Brave

by Hinn_Raven



Series: Summer 2015 Prompts [7]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Based on a Tumblr Post, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Rebellion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2019-08-29 00:23:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16733469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinn_Raven/pseuds/Hinn_Raven
Summary: In a world with no magic, Harry, Ron, and Hermione fight against the oppressive government with everything they have.They started when they were young.





	I Want to Be Brave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sroloc_Elbisivni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sroloc_Elbisivni/gifts).



> So a while ago Nina and I set to talking about [this](http://secretlystephaniebrown.tumblr.com/post/115318695537/genandhisqueen-harry-potter-muggle) post, and started crafting an elaborately detailed AU based off it. 
> 
> And when I opened prompts? They challenged me to actually write a part of it. So I did. 
> 
> Background information for those of you at home: no magic AU, Dystopia AU, seriously fucked up social structure based off castes. There are three official casts–gold, silver, and bronze, plus the casteless, who basically have no rights or protections. 
> 
> Hopefully that’s enough!

Hermione Granger was eleven years old the first time she met Ron Weasley.

She was going to a tiny little inner-city school at the time; a cramped place with not enough desks and even fewer text books. Ron Weasley was tall for his age and had hair that looked like it only had been tended to by a wet comb as he ran out of the door, with a spray of freckles that seemed to run from his hands, up the length of his arms, up his neck and all over his face.

He sat three desks to her left in history class, and  _argued_. His seat partner was a scrawny little boy named Harry Evans, with wild, wavy,  _thick_ black hair and brilliantly green eyes that Hermione had never thought existed outside of storybooks.

Ron fought with the teachers. He had the badge of a bronze caste pinned to his shirt, surprisingly highly ranked for a school like this. Hermione heard that his siblings had gone to  _Hogwarts_ , back before the famous school had closed its doors to bronzes.

Ron Weasley complained that their books are wrong, that the teachers were wrong, that everybody was lying. Hermione had been taught her whole life to keep her head down and not speak, and she  _boggled_  at this boy who fought their silver casted teachers tooth and nail, risking everything for fights that changed nothing and meant nothing. But he said things that irked Hermione, claiming that the basic facts of reality were false, and sometimes Hermione fought him on the playground, sometimes.

He claimed that Lord Riddle was not a good man; that the patrols of golds were killers; that the people who died in gas explosions and raids by the Order of the Phoenix were actually killed by the Death Eaters. Hermione wanted to plug her ears sometimes, wanted to scream at him that he was going to get them all in trouble.  _He_ was safe, Ron Weasley with his bronze badge and his anger, but the rest of them, with no badges on their shirts and no protections, they could disappear and no one would notice.

“People just sit there and do  _nothing_! Maybe it ain’t their faults, but they’re all too scared to do  _anything_!”

She went home steaming because of him, but he made her think, she’d give him that.

 _I want to be brave_. She whispered to herself before she went to sleep.

She heard screams, some nights, as the Death Eaters raided her apartment building. Her parents pulled her out of bed and hid her in the back of the closet. Hermione owned few toys—it was easier to hide her presence if her things were grown-up things; mainly books.

Hermione looked at the large skull-and-snake symbol sprawled across the door of her neighbors down the hall; the old woman who had lived with her daughter and son-in-law was gone now, they said she had a heart attack but no one believed it.

Hermione looked at the graffiti that had popped up on the street on her way to school.

**JOIN THE ORDER, FIGHT THE FEAR**

Hermione wanted to be brave.

She made notes in the corner of her notebook during class. Two days after the graffiti had appeared, it was painted over. The next morning new graffiti was painted on—bright gold and red, sloppily done but earnest.

The pattern continued, and Hermione managed to figure out the time in which the Death Eaters were patrolling the wrong part of the street. She timed their patrols with a tiny stop-watch she had inherited from her father and made notes in her journal.

She had long ago mapped the locations of the cameras that watched for illicit activity, and she knew their blind-spots too. One night, when her parents were at a friend’s house and her babysitter fell asleep, Hermione crept out of the house to watch the paint go up.

It was Harry Evans, the quiet boy with no caste, and Ron Weasley. Somehow, Hermione wasn’t surprised.

“Your letters are crooked,” she told him, crossing her arms. “And you’ve got paint on your nose. No one would believe you weren’t responsible for this if you’re going to be this careless.”

He spluttered at her, incoherent with rage, and Hermione felt smug, watching him trip over himself instead of so sure in his words, in his righteousness.

Harry looked at her, green eyes examining her carefully. “Are you going to help then?”

They cover more ground with the three of them—gold and red again, the letters straight, the same size at the beginning as they are at the end. Hermione grinned at them. “So are you a  _part_  of the Order?” She asked, curious.

“We’re too young,” Ron said, before Harry shushed him.

“The patrol!” He muttered, eyes wide.

“They’re early!” Hermione checked her watch.

“Must have heard something,” Ron muttered, eyes darting around as he tried to think of a way out.

“ _Run_!” Hermione hissed, grabbing both of their hands. This was  _her_ neighborhood, she knew it better than anyone. She dragged them up the fire escape and over the roof, through the hidden entrance in the attic and down into the rickety ladder into her hallway.

Her parents were staring at her, eyes wide with fear—they probably had only just realized that she was gone, given that they were still in their visiting clothes, papers clutched in their hands.

“ _Hermione_!” Her mother began, before cutting herself off as she stared at the two boys following her.

“Mum, Dad, this is Harry and Ron, do you mind if they stay with us?” She said smoothly.

She knew her parents saw the golden paint under her nails, but they said nothing, except mouth “ _Ron_ ,” to each other, clearly recognizing him from her stories. Hermione flushed but Ron and Harry didn’t remark upon it.

They stayed up late whispering in her room, whispering secrets that should never be said where silvers or golds could hear. She learned that Harry’s father had been a gold—a  _Potter_ , a family that was dead now. He and Harry’s mother, who had been a casteless before she married James, making her a silver as the laws said, had been killed in a bombing by Sirius Black, who was a Death Eater. Hermione shivered to herself as Ron told her about his uncles, the Prewett bombers, who had died in one of their own explosions, and about how his mother, Molly, was the uncaught final member, the one who had made the bombs that had so devastated the government for so long.

Hermione shared the patrol routes and the camera positions, the numbers and the information that she had gathered—she showed them her notebooks.

“You should code those,” Ron said to her grimly. “You don’t want to risk anyone understanding them if they read over your shoulder in class.”

“Why would anyone read over my shoulder?”

“They could be trying to copy your notes. You’re brilliant, you know that, right?” Ron said, oblivious to her blush. “This is great stuff, you’re a bloody fantastic spy.”

Ron and Harry walked with her to school the next day, and walked her to her apartment afterwards. But the day after that, they didn’t show up. She learned that they had been transferred to a different school, one that had more bronzes so that Ron would “fit in” more. Harry, she would learn much later, had gone to a different family.

She wouldn’t see them again until she was sixteen years old.

* * *

She was fifteen years old and she was now not just a spy, but a spymaster. Her notebooks were filled with codes that looked like notes for her homework—she now went to a magnet school that attracted the best and the brightest of the casteless, mixing them with a few less-prestigious silvers and bronzes.

Her spies were the children, the garbage workers, and the mail carriers—they all brought her whispers and rumors, information scribbled onto receipts and napkins in words that no one that had a caste would ever understand. “Troll” for Death Eater, “wand” for gun, “muggle” for dead. The language was Hermione’s; it was the language of the casteless, and she didn’t know what to do now.

Her network was built but what could she  _do_? She didn’t have the resources to help the people she now knew is in danger—a whole street was killed yesterday, and she knew the names of the next three on the list; they’re hidden amongst lines of poetry that she carried in her pocket.

Suddenly she remembers a note slipped to her by one of her classmates.

 _A couple of Gryffindors holed up by the Fat Lady—supposed to be some of Fawkes’ lot_ ,  _but younger. Our age, I reckon._

Gryffindor was the word for brave—stupidly, idealistically brave. Fighters too, eager for a cause. And a connection to the Order of the Phoenix… Hermione frowned. The group had been quiet lately—Lord Riddle had been dealing out raids that were crippling them.

Maybe she could help them.

Finding them was easy—she had the password to get into the back room of the Fat Lady within an hour, and she made her way there, keeping her head down so no cameras could track her face.

She had a code-name all prepared, lies tucked under her tongue, ready for use. The Order rarely recruited casteless—they cherry picked from the discontents of silvers and bronzes, with a couple of golds who rarely held the title long after associating with Dumbledore and his ragtag group. Hermione whispered “pig snout” into the door, and it swung open, and she climbed the spiral stairs to find these Gryffindors.

She pushed open the door, and she froze, and the two boys inside froze.

Ron Weasley and Harry Potter were unmistakable, even after all those years. Ron’s freckles hadn’t diminished, and Harry’s eyes were as green as ever. Ron was staring, slack jawed, and Hermione pulled down her hood so she could stare freely.

She hadn’t expected  _them_. She hadn’t known what she had expected—older than her, definitely, maybe bristling with weapons and discontent, not sitting in front of a roaring fire playing chess and talking about strategy.  _Gryffindors_ , she thought, and she realized how much of a risk they were all taking; how much she was going to ask them to risk.

She thought about three streets that would be dead within the month.

 _I want to be brave_ , she thought, like she had when she was eleven, the words warm in her stomach and reminding her what she had come here to do.

“Well boys,” she said, when she recovered her thoughts enough to speak. “I have a proposition for you.”

Harry and Ron looked at each other, and then they turned to her. “What have you got?” Harry asked, grinning slightly.

Hermione pulled out her notebook, and began to explain. They listened.

History books would later describe that meeting as the foundation of Dumbledore’s Army, but the three of them would always look at each other and disagree. Dumbledore’s Army came later—it came with Neville and his book of poisons, with Luna and her whispered conspiracies, with Ginny and her fire, with the twins and their bombs, Lee and his voice. It would happen in a room they called  _Requirement_ , in Minerva McGonagall’s basement after Albus Dumbledore was killed by a sniper in the midst of a rally.

Or maybe it was born in an alley, with three children painting graffiti on a wall, running away when the trolls came for them, red and gold splashed on their hands like blood.

Either way it was not born that night. That night was just a reunion of old friends. They wouldn’t save the streets—they handed it off to other people, with more resources. But it was Hermione’s first use of her network, and it made Harry’s eyes spark with curiosity and determination.

They were going to change the world, the three of them.


End file.
